


A Tale Brought Home to the Grassy Ocean

by merriman



Category: Chronicles of Narnia - C. S. Lewis, Die unendliche Geschichte | The Neverending Story - Michael Ende
Genre: Book shops, Crossover, Gen, Original Character(s), Worldbuilding, journeys
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-10-09
Updated: 2018-10-09
Packaged: 2019-07-28 16:21:00
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,771
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16245371
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/merriman/pseuds/merriman
Summary: After the death of her family, Susan Pevensie finds a new world to explore.





	A Tale Brought Home to the Grassy Ocean

**Author's Note:**

  * For [scribblemyname](https://archiveofourown.org/users/scribblemyname/gifts).



> This prompt took me a bit to wrap my head around, but I knew as soon as I saw it that I needed to write it.
> 
> Thank you to my very patient beta.

It was to be expected that after one lost one's entire family - not to mention a handful of family friends - one's calendar would be limited to memorial services and funerals and a few teary-eyed lunches with friends. Susan started keeping a tin of biscuits in her pantry for the sole purpose of putting them out when an acquaintance popped by her flat to check up on her. She'd make tea and put out the biscuits and listen politely while whoever it was murmured condolences and told her their own stories of how they'd known her parents or her siblings or her cousin or even old Professor Kirke. Thanks to a rather horrid article in one of the papers, it seemed everyone now knew that Susan Pevensie had stayed at old Professor Kirke's house during the war and wasn't that such a terrible coincidence, him being on the same train as her parents and siblings and dying just like they did? Yes. It was a coincidence. At least, that's what Susan told herself as she went about her days, going to work, buying groceries, going home, listening to the radio. 

A month earlier her social calendar had been full, with parties and dances and all sorts of distractions. Now, when she could well have used something to take her mind off of it all, well, no one was going to ask her to go dancing when she was clearly in mourning. It just wouldn't do.

Susan heard the pity in her friends' voices when they phoned. She tried not to resent them for going on without her, having a good time, but it was hard when she got home from the shop on a Friday evening and there was nothing to do but read or do the laundry. Truly though, she wasn't in the mood to go dancing. So when one of her coworkers asked if Susan could take her evening shift, Susan said yes, of course, and found herself sitting in the bookshop on a Saturday evening.

A bookshop wouldn't have been her first choice of jobs, but it was a nice little place, all things considered, and the owner was usually too distracted by his own writing to mind much what Susan and the other two employees did. He wasn't even there that evening. He'd left around four when the other girl had gone. Susan had the whole shop to herself, which meant she could put on a record and read a bit if she wanted. Customers liked a cheery shop, especially on a damp evening with a chill in the air. 

Susan passed the time between customers by putting away the books that had arrived that week, finding just the right places for them among the rest of the stock. She'd found a whole set of geography books and was trying to make space for them when a book caught her eye. It was large and ornate and the cover was some sort of coppery fabric. Susan did a lot of the stocking and she couldn't for the life of her remember seeing this book before. She pulled it out and found that the cover was even more intricate than the spine had looked. There was a metal emblem affixed right in the center, a sort of twined pair of snakes. 

Really, it should have been off-putting. Susan had never been overly fond of snakes, though she could certainly handle them when necessary. But a pair of them chasing each other? It was bizarre. Still, something drew her to it. She'd never seen any book quite like it. Susan shook herself a little, setting the book down on the cart she'd been using to bring books to the shelves. It was all she could do not to pick it back up and sit down right there on the floor of the shop and read it.

No. The book would be a treat for after she finished stocking the geography shelves, and perhaps after tidying up the front displays as well. Susan wheeled the little cart back to the counter and returned to work on the shelves. She did the tidying up and she even swept the floor. A few more customers came in and she helped them, then she took a seat behind the till and picked up the book from the cart.

It was heavy, which was to be expected, and the pages inside looked to be made of thick paper, their rough edges worn in places. So it wasn't a brand new book. That much was clear. They didn't usually do used books in the shop. Not out front anyhow. The owner did sometimes buy used books to sell again, but they were more costly and he kept them in a locked case in the back room. Perhaps this one had been put on the wrong stack for stocking? Susan hesitated, her hand on the cover, wondering if maybe she shouldn't just bring it out back to the office and leave it there with a note that it had been misshelved. 

That would be for the best, yes. Still. What harm would it do to take a peek inside? Susan knew well how to handle books properly. It wasn't as if she was going to break the spine or dog-ear the pages. 

Slowly, Susan opened the cover. On the title page inside were the words "The NeverEnding Story" with no author or anything. She turned to the verso, but there was nothing there, not even a date. It had to be something made by hand, very old, but it didn't feel old. It didn't feel precisely new either, but it didn't have that brittle feel that old books get, even the very well made ones.

Beyond the title page the book simply began, with no introduction or table of contents.

> It was early in the morning when Alua set out from the Grassy Ocean. She had her bow and her quiver of arrows and a bag with some food and a cloak of purple buffalo hair wrapped around her shoulders. And she had her horse, Fytis. The last of her people to venture forth to the rest of the world had died in the night, his stories of the world outside the prairie passed on to Alua and three others who would go out if Alua did not return in a year and a day. Her purpose was to gather tales, to learn what had changed in the world since Boryti had gone, then come back to tell what she had learned. 
> 
> After proving herself as a hunter two years before, Boryti had chosen her and the others and started telling them the tales. When Alua's parents had died, she had volunteered to be the first to go when it was time. As she rode through the prairie, Alua told the tales back to herself and to Fytis.
> 
> She told the tale of the Rock Biters, who ate holes in the mountains and spoke of the flavors of quartz and basalt and coal. She told the tale of one Rock Biter who ate his own bed one night while he was asleep.
> 
> She told the tale of the horsefish of the Lake of Rust, and their unceasing war with the infinite serpent that lives in the bottom of the lake, eating the rust as it falls down through the water from the surface where it grows. 
> 
> She told the tale of the racing snails of the Teeny Weenies and all the signs to tell if a racing snail has been by and how to avoid being knocked over by one moving at speed. 
> 
> By the time she had finished the tale of the cloud swimmers who are lighter than air and who dive from cloud to cloud, swimming through them like they are pools, Alua had reached the edge of the Grassy Ocean. The sight of trees would have been a shock to her, had she not heard so many tales of them. What she wasn't prepared for, however, was one of the trees uprooting itself and coming forward to meet her.
> 
> "What can this be?" she asked Fytis.
> 
> "I am sure I do not know," Fytis replied, for in this land, the horses all talked, and Fytis had heard all the same tales that Alua had heard.

Susan set the book down. Talking horses were ridiculous, of course. Except she'd had one once, and then she'd put it from her mind when she'd realized she would never see her again. She didn't even know she was crying until a tear dropped onto her lap and she was instantly glad she had sat back and the book was on the desk. Susan pulled out her handkerchief and dabbed carefully at her eyes.

It was so foolish. Adventures, talking horses, bows and arrows and grand quests, it was all just children's stories. That's what this book was too. It was a children's story clothed in a fancy cover. She had outgrown all of that. Except as she had read about Alua riding across the prairie, she had felt the motion of riding, she could almost smell the horse. She knew the weight of a bow and a quiver on her back. How could she know that unless it had actually happened?

And if it had actually happened, if it had all been real and true, why had it ended? Why had she never gone back to Narnia when the others had?

Susan looked at the book on the desk, then at the clock nearby. It was past closing. She'd gotten so engrossed in the book, she'd lost track of time. So she got up and went to lock the door and flip the sign and turn out the lights in the main shop. But then she did a curious thing she'd never have considered doing before that very night: She brought the book back into the little office that the staff used to put their things and she turned on the light in there and she shut the door and took a seat and continued to read.

> While Alua was meeting one of the Wandering Woods, far off in the very center of Fantasia, something was growing. It had once been a wild and untamed tumble of flowers and brambles and stone and metal vines that grew like plants and flowered with crystal petals. Now the shrubbery shifted, first into lines and then into walls and then into pathways. The brambles shrunk and blossomed and the stone and metal vines grew into the forms of benches and tables and trellises for the other plants to twine around. And in the middle of it all a little flower made of ivory poked out from the grass. It grew quickly, branching out and then joining again to form first a little gatehouse, then an entry hall, then a tower, then two towers. While it grew, around it the Labyrinth formed.
> 
> Alua, of course, knew nothing about this, for she was still just beyond the borders of the Grassy Ocean. She and Fytis were being introduced to all of the Wandering Woods that had been traveling throughout Fantasia.
> 
> "We're looking for the Empress," one of the Woods told her. "Are you her?"
> 
> "Of course not," Alua told it. "I am Alua, a tale hunter of the Grassy Ocean. I'm going to find tales for my people and bring them back in a year and a day."
> 
> Around her and Fytis, all the Woods nodded, their branches brushing against each other as if a breeze had just come through.
> 
> "We can tell you a tale," one of the Woods said. "We can tell you tales of trees and Will-o'-the-wisps. We can tell you tales of the Lake of Rust where we grew last. Travel with us to find the Childlike Empress and we will tell you many tales."
> 
> "But why are you looking for her?" Alua asked them. "Is she missing?"
> 
> "She went away," one of the Woods said. "She said she would return and when she did it would be as if she had never left, but she has not returned. The Ivory Tower became small and she plucked it like a flower from the ground and gifted it to a centaur named Cairon and told him to plant it when the time was right and she would return."
> 
> Alua nodded. She did not ask how Cairon would know the time was right. Centaurs were known to be wise. The Empress would not have entrusted this task to him had she not known he would choose the right time.
> 
> "I will go with you," she told them. "These tales you have, I would hear them, please. Can you tell them as we travel?"
> 
> "We can," the Woods said, and then they were off, the Woods wandering past along the borders of the Grassy Ocean and Alua on Fytis amongst their trunks. 
> 
> They traveled many miles and the Woods told Alua of all the places they had been and the soil into which they had sunk their roots. They told her tales of underground caverns and tunnels and the creatures that lived in them and never came up above the surface, but those are stories for another time.
> 
> The whole of the time Alua traveled with the Woods, the Woods sought the Empress. Once, while they stopped for the night and all manner of other creatures came through the Woods unknowing that these trees would wander away again at daybreak, a bat flew by and then circled back to stop in the trees while a little figure climbed down and landed right in front of Alua while she ate her supper.
> 
> "Hello," she said. "Are you a Night Hob?"
> 
> "You've heard of us!" the Night Hob said, grinning widely. "I am, I am indeed! Tell me, are you, perhaps, the Empress?"
> 
> "I am not," Alua told him. "I can't imagine that I look much like her."
> 
> "Oh, no, maybe not," the Night Hob said. He squinted at her. "For a moment I was so certain you were her, but then I've never met her. I was just told that she is traveling and that we're all to be on the look-out."
> 
> "We're looking for her too," Alua said, gesturing to the trees around her and to Fytis, who was grazing nearby. "Do you travel by daylight or only at night?"
> 
> "Only at night, I'm afraid," the Night Hob said. "Or I'd join you! Good luck on your search!"

Susan had to pause. She'd never taken her own supper break and now went to her little locker against the wall and took out the sandwich she'd packed that morning. There was a stove in the office and a little kettle they used to make tea, so she put that on too and sat to eat.

It would be horribly bad manners to read while eating, so Susan left the book on the desk and ate her sandwich over her handkerchief in her lap.

Now, why on Earth would this Empress have gone away? What sort of a leader just abandons her people? The thought of it was unsettling and uncomfortable, and Susan felt a pang of guilt for something she couldn't quite place. She pondered that for a while until the whistle of the kettle interrupted her thoughts.

"Perhaps she simply needed a vacation," she sighed as she made up the cup of tea and brought it back to the desk. "Or she had some sort of quest of her own. After all, she said she would return, didn't she. So she will. If she's any sort of good Empress, she'll return when she's needed."

> In the center of Fantasia, the Ivory Tower was growing larger and larger. Inside where there had only been empty rooms there were now tables and chairs and bookcases and beds and people of all kinds who had come from all over. They hadn't known why they were traveling until they had arrived and remembered, this was their home. They lived here and worked here and they were the court of the Childlike Empress who had gone away but who would surely soon return.
> 
> So they started to prepare for her arrival, sending messengers out to tell the creatures and people of Fantasia that the Empress would be back soon, and to look for her wherever she might be.
> 
> After her meeting with the Night Hob, Alua had gone out of her way to try and speak to as many creatures as she could. One of the tallest Woods let her climb its branches so she could call to the birds as they flew by and some would come and roost and they would talk for a while about the Empress and tales from the skies and clouds and the floating mountains far off to the west.
> 
> When they stopped at a lake surrounded by pink boulders, Alua went and dipped her head into the sparkling water and called out to the bubbles that lived there and they rose to the surface and popped to tell her their tales and to say that no, they had not seen the Empress.
> 
> "Where do you think she went if no one in Fantasia has seen her?" Alua asked Fytis as she dried herself off.
> 
> "Perhaps she left Fantasia," Fytis suggested. "Do you remember the tale of the human child who named her?"
> 
> That was a tale not from Alua's teacher, Boryti, and not of his, but of his teacher's teacher's teacher. A tale hunter who had lived long long before Alua had been born. Her tales were passed down too, but over time things were bound to have shifted in the telling, that was part of what made the tales special. A human child had named the Childlike Empress? A child from outside the realms of Fantasia? It was almost too much to believe.

Susan stopped and re-read that passage. Now, this was asking a bit too much of a reader. You couldn't just go writing a fantasy story and then say it was all a part of the real world.

> "I remember," Alua said. "But it's such a very old story. Do you truly think there's a world out there beyond Fantasia? How would she get there?"
> 
> "Who knows what the Childlike Empress can do?" Fytis pointed out. "She made the Ivory Tower small, then plucked it like a flower. If she can do that, surely she could go beyond the borders of Fantasia and visit the humans wherever they live."

Her sandwich long gone and a few biscuits too, Susan had pulled her chair up close to the desk and was utterly captivated by the book. As she read about Alua and Fytis's journey with the Wandering Woods she could almost feel the breeze in her hair. She could almost smell the leaves and the flowers. It was almost as if she was riding alongside Alua.

When Alua and Fytis parted from the Woods for a day to hunt and make provisions, Susan remembered doing the same on long journeys through Narnia. She felt the bow in her hands, knew when to take the shot. When they stopped to meet with a fire sprite and the Wandering Woods sent Alua to speak to it, afraid to get too close lest they catch fire themselves, Susan could feel the heat it gave off. 

The clock on the desk ticked away, well into the night now while Susan continued to read. Her tea had gone cold in her mug and she'd barely noticed, sipping it anyhow and thinking nothing of it while Alua drank crisp chilled water from a stream after talking to a little man made of leaves who cared for it.

> "How long have you been looking for the Empress?" Alua asked the Woods as they moved across a great wide glassy expanse. The Woods had been nervous about it, but gone ahead when Alua had scouted and promised it was no more than an hour's travel. There was just nothing for their roots to go into there, so it was like they were gliding across ice.
> 
> "Oh, years and years," the Woods told her as they slid their way across the glass. Their roots made keening sounds that echoed and sang like music. "We were not always Wandering. We were once the Wide Woods, that grew around the edges of the Labyrinth that surrounds the Ivory Tower."
> 
> "So when the Empress left, you must have seen her," Alua said. "She must have gone through you."
> 
> The trees rustled in thought, then shook, sending echoes across the glass. "No," they said. "No, she did not walk through us. She just _left_. She was there, and then she was not there. We stayed for a time while the Labyrinth grew wild and Cairon would travel through us sometimes. But no. When she went traveling, she must have left Fantasia in another way."
> 
> "However shall we find her?" Alua wondered. And just at that moment, an echo came up through the glass, vibrating it under her feet.
> 
> _I'm coming,_ it said.

Susan clapped a hand over her mouth. Why had she said that? What would possess her to say such a thing? Then she looked down at the book. And how had they heard it?

> They were almost at the other side of the glass but now Alua and Fytis and the Woods all stopped and looked around. The voice had come from everywhere and nowhere. If they hadn't been on the glass, would they even have heard it? But then nothing else was said and Alua led the Woods off the glass and back onto the soil they preferred. 
> 
> "We are almost to the Labyrinth," the Woods told her. "Perhaps when we get there, the Empress will have already returned."
> 
> Alua nodded, but she wasn't so sure. If the Empress was coming, then how would she already be there? 
> 
> It was two more days of travel before they met anyone else, and when they did they met many people all at once. There were dwarfs and fauns and giants and the tablestones from deep in the mines. There was a great boar with two heads who argued with herself and anyone who approached her, but it was all good-natured to be sure. Three little birds with lizard heads who rode in Alua's hair told her short tales about their journey and Alua dutifully memorized them. There was even a centaur with the group and as the Woods engulfed everyone they greeted him.
> 
> "Cairon, we think she is returning," they told him. "We heard her on the glass bowl. She said she was coming," they said. And Cairon just nodded and thanked them and raced ahead.
> 
> "He is a very good doctor," the Woods told Alua. "He was the Empress's most trusted physician."
> 
> As they approached the Labyrinth, the Woods hung back. 
> 
> "Aren't you coming?" Alua asked them. "Don't you want to see if she's there?"
> 
> The Woods all quivered and rustled. "We will wait for her to visit us and tell us if we should be the Wide Woods or the Wandering Woods," they said. "You go meet her for us."
> 
> So Alua joined with the others who were still going towards the tower. And as she looked up she could see that still it was growing, taller and taller, rooms still forming and windows opening. Right near the top, almost too high for her to see from down on the ground, was what looked like the bud of a flower, just starting to form.

In the little office in the back of the bookshop where Susan had spent the past two years working, there was a small desk and a set of three lockers and a stove and a tea kettle and Susan's coat and handbag. Susan herself, well, she was there. But not there. If you have ever been so utterly caught up in a story that you forget where you are and what is around you, you will know what that is like. Susan was indeed sitting at that desk in that office in that bookshop, but she was also climbing the stairs and ramps of the Ivory Tower with Alua and Fytis and all the others of Fantasia who had come to welcome the Childlike Empress home.

And even as she was climbing the stairs of the Ivory Tower, she was also climbing the stairs at Cair Paravel, a crown on her head and people waiting to greet their new kings and queens. She could feel that tension, that fear of not being good enough, of not knowing what to do. They'd been children then, taking thrones without knowing how to rule. And they'd had to figure it out so quickly. While the Narnians had, at first, been happy simply to not be ruled by the White Witch anymore, they'd also needed competent rulers. People who could make fair - and sometimes difficult - decisions. Susan had prided herself on making the Narnians who came to her feel that she was listening, that she cared. Because she had.

If this Empress was worth anything, she would do the same.

> At the top of the tower the bud had turned into a blossom, just beginning to unfurl. The room it was in was both close and infinitely large at the same time, making space for everyone who had arrived and all those who continued to come through the doors at the top of the stairs.
> 
> Alua took a spot near the back. She had come for tales, not to make a spectacle of herself. And what a tale this would be! Of the Childlike Empress' return to Fantasia after a journey somewhere beyond its borders.
> 
> One by one, the petals of the flower peeled down, creating a platform that held a soft bed. And in that bed was a young woman who knew what it was to be a child in a new world full of wondrous things, and an adult who could rule and care for every one of those things, no matter how difficult they may be.
> 
> Susan sat up in the bed and looked around, taking in all the creatures and people who had come to see her. She'd been gone from Narnia for so long, and now she knew she'd been gone from Fantasia even longer. She'd been Susan Pevensie, yes. Of course she had been. She'd been Lucy and Edmund and Peter's sister. She'd lived a whole life as a human girl and woman and she'd lived another life as a Queen of Narnia. It had been exactly what she had needed.
> 
> As she welcomed her envoys she caught sight of Alua back among the crowd. She couldn't let her slip away when they'd been traveling companions for so long. She left the bed, making her way through everyone who had gathered, thanking them all as she went, then stopped at Alua and Fytis.
> 
> "Thank you for letting me travel with you," she told them. "And for bringing me home. You'll have plenty of tales to tell now."
> 
> Alua bowed her head to the Childlike Empress, speechless.
> 
> "We should leave soon," Fytis said after a moment. "We must be back in a year and a day, and this journey has taken us just under half of that."
> 
> Susan nodded. "Of course. Before you go, would you like to hear a tale? I have a very good one for you to carry back to the Grassy Ocean. Come, sit with me. I will tell you all about four children and land far from here."

In the morning, one of the other employees, a young man named Carl, came to open the shop. When he'd unlocked the front door and turned on the lights he found the light still on in the back office. But the shop was otherwise undisturbed. Susan had closed up the night before and she was usually so good about such things. Still, she'd had such a hard time of it recently, what with her family and all. He tossed out the cold tea that had been left on the desk in the office, then picked up a book that had been sitting there. It was a very odd book, he thought to himself. All coppery and with a metal device on the front. Perhaps the owner would let him buy it. After all, Carl planned on opening his own shop some day. He'd need some curiosities to start himself off. 


End file.
